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Google's new NHS deal is start of machine learning marketplace

Google's DeepMind will train AI to spot eye disease using NHS data. The terms of the partnership show how such deals could benefit both sides

An eye for an AI

David Bishop

By Hal Hodson

DEEPMIND, Google’s London-based artificial intelligence company, has started training neural networks to recognise the signs of eye disease in medical images. A partnership with Moorfields Eye Hospital in London has given the company access to about a million anonymised retinal scans, which DeepMind will feed into its artificial intelligence software.

The project will target two of the most common eye diseases – age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. More than 100 million people around the world have these conditions.

Moorfields is providing scans of the back of people’s eyes, as well as more detailed scans known as optical coherence tomography (OCT). The idea is that the images will let DeepMind’s neural networks learn to recognise subtle signs of degenerating eye conditions that even trained clinicians have trouble spotting.

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This could make it possible for a machine learning system to detect the onset of disease before a human doctor could. The earlier the better, says Gadi Wollstein, an eye doctor at the University of Pittsburgh. “Patients are losing tissue and the loss is irreversible,” he says. “The longer we’re waiting, the worse the outcome.”

Any automated diagnosis software DeepMind comes up with could also make its way to high-street opticians, who are increasingly using OCT, says Pearse Keane, the Moorfields ophthalmologist who approached DeepMind with the idea in 2015. “About 10 per cent of high-street opticians have OCT – it’s likely that big national chains will adopt it.”

DeepMind’s partnership with Moorfields gives us an early look at how the marketplace for machine learning could work. DeepMind will not get paid for any of the work it does. However, it does get to test out algorithms on real data and keep the neural networks it trains using that data.

“If you’re going to use publicly funded data, you need a very, very clear public benefit“

The valuable knowledge about eye disease contained in Moorfield’s anonymous data set will become the property of DeepMind, built into its artificial intelligence systems. In effect, training its machine learning systems on real-world health data is DeepMind’s payment for advancing diagnostic AI.

For Wollstein, who worked at Moorfields in the 1990s, the exchange is worth it. DeepMind may get free access to valuable patient data – but the alternative is to keep potential insight locked up and inaccessible to human analysis. At the end of the day, says Wollstein, DeepMind’s research might result in a great boost to the NHS, at zero financial cost to the taxpayer.

But some still have reservations about Google’s use of NHS data. “You could do machine learning on this data without DeepMind,” says Javier Ruiz of the Open Rights Group. “You have to ask whether this is the right quid pro quo. If you say you’re going to use publicly funded data, you need a very, very clear public benefit.”